Chromium OS was first made available in compiled form by hobbyists. More organized efforts have emerged over time, including a few manufacturers that have shipped devices with the operating system pre-installed.

By May 2010, compiled versions of the work-in-progress source code had been downloaded from the Internet more than a million times. The most popular version, entitled "Chromium OS Flow", was created by Liam McLoughlin, a then 17-year-old college student in Manchester, England, posting under the name "Hexxeh". McLoughlin's build boots from a USB memory stick and included features that Google engineers had not yet implemented, such as support for the Java programming language.[5] While Google did not expect that hobbyists would use and evaluate Chromium OS ahead of its official release, Sundar Pichai, Google vice president of product management (now the CEO) said that "what people like Hexxeh are doing is amazing to see." Pichai said the early releases were an unintended consequence of open source development. "If you decide to do open-source projects, you have to be open all the way."[5]

Hexxeh's work continued into the following year. He announced "Chromium OS Lime" in December 2010,[6] and in January 2011, released "Luigi", an application designed to "jailbreak"/"root" the GoogleCr-48 "Mario" prototype hardware and install a generic BIOS.[7] The developer made the builds available in virtual machine format on March 13, 2011.[8] With no official build of Chromium OS forthcoming from Google, Hexxeh's "vanilla" nightly builds of Chromium OS were the principal resource for people wanting to try Chromium OS. Hexxeh stopped uploading his builds on April 20, 2013.

More recent versions of Chromium OS are available from Arnoldthebat, who maintains daily and weekly builds[9] along with usage guidelines and help.[10] In July 2012, Chromium Build Kit was released. It automatically compiles a developer build and installs Chromium OS on a USB drive.[11]

ChromiumOS Cherry
Now known as "Flow"
(4 December 2009)

ChromiumOS Zero
Now known as "Vanilla "
(9 December 2009)

ChromiumOS Flow
(15 February 2010)

ChromiumOS Vanilla Login Screen
(15 March 2011)

In 2015, New York City-based Neverware produced a Chromium OS fork called CloudReady aimed at the educational market, with the intention of extending the life of older PCs and laptops.[12][13] A subsequent version can dual-boot Neverware and the Windows operating system.[14] In 2016, Nexedi released NayuOS, a fork of Chromium OS precompiled for several Chromebook computers. The operating system provides Chrome OS-like capabilities without storing data on Google servers. It optionally removes the Google login and provides additional developer tools.[15][16]

Some devices have shipped with Chromium OS preinstalled. In May 2011, Dell Computer also released a new build for the Dell Inspiron Mini 10v netbook, following up on an earlier build released almost 18 months earlier. The build did not support audio, but was bootable from a USB drive.[17] Other devices include the Kogan Agora Chromium Laptop by the Australian company Kogan[18] and the Xi3 Modular Computer, introduced by the company of the same name.[19][20] In late 2015, a team headed by Dylan Callahan released a beta Chromium OS port to the Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer.[21]

In June 2011, ISYS Technologies, based in Salt Lake City, sued Google in a Utah district court, claiming rights to the name "Chromium" and, by default, Chromebook and Chromebox. The suit sought to stop Google and its hardware and marketing partners from selling Chromebooks.[22] The suit was later dismissed and, as part of an undisclosed settlement between Google and ISYS, ISYS abandoned its trademark efforts.